Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Am I a Writer or an Author?

Make Mine
Mystery

May 2, 2017

Every day, I sit down at my desk
and write for about two and half hour a day, three hours a day, seven days a
week. I write with great anticipation, excitement, and fear. I write
thousands of words. I delete a thousand more. I let the story guide me. I
indulge my fantasies and plot lines. I write scenes I can see and feel intensely,
with no idea where they’d end up in the book, and I worry if it would all came
together in the end.

And sometimes I feel like a writer,
a real writer. It’s an amazing feeling. I’ve just finished a book that I began two years ago,
every step has been pain staking, the editing took over a year, and yet I’m
never quite satisfied, and I stress over the outcome. And somewhere along the
way, I’ve learned this lesson: everything I want and need out of writing a book
comes from theactual
act of writing a book. The rest of it –sales and marketing, what
other people think – is the stuff that matterslater or maybe it doesn’t matter at all,
because I can’t control most of that stuff, anyway.

How’d the book turn out? Good, I
think. It’s at the publisher right now, so in time I’ll let you know how it all
worked out. I’m sure there will be
another round of editing.

I've never come across a satisfactory definition of author verses writer. Merriam-Webster gives the definition of author as "the writer of a literary work (such as a book)". No mention made of whether that book is published. I've written a couple books that have not been published and numerous short stories that have. Do I get to call myself an author? The mystery continues.

I have to agree with you. I find the act of writing to be what I crave more than the sales. There is only one thing that I enjoy more than writing and that is when a reader tells me they enjoy my book!